


Aspect of Entropy

by Optimistic_Nihilist



Category: Bleach, Minecraft (Video Game)
Genre: Body Horror, Body Modification, Cannibalism, Deities, Gods are Gods, Hollows (Bleach), Memory Loss, Other, This Is Not Going To Go The Way You Think, Worldbuilding, and now i have to feed myself, and sometimes thats okay, cowards, gods are not humans, hit me up if u have a question, i have so much Thinky Thoughts about minecraft you have no idea, its a constant struggle of sacrifice and symbolism, learning enchantment table for dummies, magic is not nice, most of my fics are 'transforming into an eldritch abomination simulator' and it shows, sometimes you must simply become a little creecher, thats also a staple in my fics, the end is an extension of Hueco Mundo, the result of midnight worldbuilding, written because no one has made the obvious comparison
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-15
Updated: 2021-03-17
Packaged: 2021-03-24 05:53:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30067650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Optimistic_Nihilist/pseuds/Optimistic_Nihilist
Summary: You live, you die, you get up again. That's how existence works.(you don't know about existence the way you think you do.)aka my muse crashed into a minecraft worldbuilding party with 'what if the end is like,,, hueco mundo' and shot me dead
Relationships: the author's face/her desk, the author's muse/incomprehensible void garbage
Kudos: 2





	1. An End, and a Beginning.

An endless desert. Sand that you Know, somehow, is made of Bone. It shifts, sings, sounds, sifting over itself with a constant, low noise. The noise is comforting. The world is Empty, you know. There are no stars, simply a sky, and a moon, shifting through cycles and hanging over the planet like a noose, never moving from its apex at the centre of the sky.   
  
You feel like you should be Frightened, somehow. Like this is something that should scare you. But you’re not. It’s comforting, and familiar, the slow erosion of bones and the feeling of soft, time-smoothed sand under your toes. The endless night sky and the shifting horizon that never seems to end. One foot in front of the other. Your ribcage expands; contracts. You are Alive. This is Familiar. These things, you Know.

One foot in front of the other. You dance among the shifting hills that are the dunes, unchained by plants of any kind and free to drift along the slow breeze. Your ribcage expands, contracts. The purple bruises on your pristine pink skin are growing larger. You Breathe, and still, you Rot. 

You brush your hands, your palms, your fingers across the sallow skin, finding hollows where meat and organ used to be. This should scare you, you know. But it doesn’t, somehow. The creeping rot is Familiar. You lose sight in one eye for a moon-cycle, and feel nothing but the slow, bursting joy that is dancing among the dunes. The moon shines and its gaze is heavenly. Your skin blooms purple along one side, and you are Happy.   
  
Moon-cycles pass. Your ribcage expands, contracts. The dunes are long passed, as you dance across all of them, following the push of the air and the empty pit inside of you. Your arm is bloated, fermenting with Rot, and today the skin of your hand up to your shoulder falls, stinking, to be buried in the sands. Beneath it are scales, ribbons that bloom beneath it, and the spines that spear from where your collarbone shines purple. You glisten beneath the moonlight, your scales flashing where light reflects from them to bounce around your surroundings.    
  
What are memories? You catch the shape of spires the color of your scales branching up towards the skies, a land of empty sands but no moon, and you crave the taste of the fruits the color of the sideways-growing mushrooms that unfurl like flowers against your touch. You are not thirsty. It’s been so long you don’t know what ‘thirsty’ is, except the touch of the forbidden falls that burns against your skin.    
  
You know what ‘hungry’ is, though. You crave it. It feels like the burn of agony and ichor against your skin, the light suction of your hollowed stomach as the three-headed beast steals your life like the sunken and hollow green beings stole your skin. You think you understand what it feels like to be on the other end of those sharp teeth, to want to Bite into flesh the way blades bite into bone. The way the hell-charred skeletons bit into  _ you _ .

There is bone like the bone of the sands that branches across the still-pink side of your face, reaching solid fingers across your ribcage, and you Know something else, suddenly, like the meaning of the runes that dance across your dreams, the color of the tesseracts that circle under their prison of glass.

The you you knew is gone. You are the you something else knew now. But you still feel like you, or the you that it knew. Your dreams are filled with the static of the fountain, of the blood of the False God. Bathing in it tasted like mercury, you recall, and felt like sadness. But power without purpose is like that, and at the least you  _ earned _ this power. You stole no forbidden fruits, were not tricked, and now you know the forbidden tongue. It tasted like Victory.

You are the gravekeeper to your own demise, and the necromancer to your own bones. You crawl into your own skin after deep sleep, and feel more rested nestled into the curves of your bones than ever before. Your ribcage, even with its extra ribs on the outside, expands. contracts. The extra bones’ rattle feels like the purr of a long-forgotten friend. You still breathe, despite the taste of death on your tongue. You’ve died before, you Know. It’s not something special, or unique. You wake up, and you start again. It’s what you’ve always done.   
  
(You’ve lived before, too. But that’s not unique, or important, either. Living and dying is an endless cycle of waking up and starting again. It’s  _ always _ been breathe; one foot in front of the other. That’s what existence  _ is. _ )

The False God speaks, in your dreams. It whispers words you no longer understand, but strike some deep part of you like a bell. You should feel terror, you know. The False God has never spoken before. But, well. The resurrected Avatar of War cries soundlessly into the wind and singing sands. Beneath the bulk that is the World, the incarnation of human misery sounds pitiful. Its skull now lays with all the others, after all.    
  
She’s beautiful, you Know. She’s the incarnation of evolution, decorated with the bones of those who refused to respect her, and the sand is the marking of all of those who continued their ignorance until they were ground dust under the force of her gaze. She could kill you without thought, caught in the blooddrunk thirst that is her skin, the gladiator arena that is her home. You kneel at her feet, and never turn your back. 

(she gives you a slice of those long before, a mask to cover the most human parts of your face that remain. she does not kiss your brow, but the emotion is there in the sweeping gesture she gives before she leaves. you’ve almost forgotten what love feels like when it comes from another person, and the strange hole in your chest widens slightly with the regards of this foreign god. the false god is not so much removed, but Stomped from your dreams. the blood does not itch anymore. the rot has never ached as little as it does now.)

You hunger, the child of a new god in the way you were never a child of your old one. You were so hungry, so impossibly hungry. You wandered into the starless night and smelled something faint on the wind. Speed like you never knew was possible. Hunting has never before felt Like This. It feels like the moment the flying boat falls to the ground, like the feral drumbeat of your feet, the sand, and your bones. It feels like sinking your teeth into the egg, into the stone that birthed an abomination. You want to taste it again.   
  
The forests are a graveyard of fossilized bone. What titans they must have been. You hope they died in a kinder world than yours. 

Inhale. Exhale. Taste the death of many on the backs of your fangs. Feel the movement of the bones that are yours, and the bones that are not. One foot in front of the other. The canyon walls are too tall to climb, and too steep to step. The sand here grates, too fresh and angry, and the feeling of death rumbles in your chest like the singing of the sands. Are you dreaming?

The taste of static sprawls over your tongue like an emotion you can no longer name. Inhale. The flexing of your bones and the pounding of your feet against the sand as you Chase. The slowing of some unnamed law, the flexing of some organ that you only now feel, and the familiar sound of those the color of the Void taking a step. Small, glowing spores shed from your form as you dig pointed digits into your query, something behind your teeth screaming of  _ how  _ **_dare_ ** _ you be perceived! _

Exhale. You bloom like the forgotten flowers, the only living denizen of the empty forest, like the decay that smelled like entropy in the dry taste of rotting bones. Of the not-mushroom that exploded with spores in contact with the wetness of your mouth, like the acid that fell upwards in the dried hollows of the empty, abandoned phantom hives. 

_ Oh. _ You remember much more, now.

First, you remember Waking. There were no trees on your shallow little island, but there were flowers aplenty, and the ruins of some strange temple, pointing towards the sun. A cave along the edges of the ocean, close enough to drink if you wanted. Hollowing a little home in the sides of the stone. Drowning, once, racing from the consequences of your desecration. The ocean was angry, but your tombstone stayed afloat. 

Making a mold with collected stones, pouring lava through the cracks and cooling it with water, and again and again until you had a perfect frame. Striking flint and iron together and watching the spark set the obsidian alight. A world of heat and the constant, molten screaming of the damned in various stages of decay. Souls compacted into stone and eroded by time into powder, collected and compressed again into four usable blocks. The empty fortress built from bricks of rotted blood, the skeletons of those who died to build it charred black with the hatred. The fire burning the edges of the temple itself coming alive to add you to this hell’s collection of rotting dead. How many times did you burn?

The charred skulls, arranged on the soul’s sand. A beast, a king of hell with three heads. The sound of the landscape decaying beneath their king, the feeling of his black flesh on yours as you, too, decayed beneath his tempestuous grasp.

The molten souls reaching from their fiery tomb, fire in their eyes and the cooling lava of their bodies covering their gelatinous form, coiling and launching themselves in his way. The distraction saved you another death.   
  
Another ribcage growing over his own, as the marks of your arrows cease to pierce his carbon form. Your blade would not be enough, but it had to be. 

It wasn’t. Another death. The not-ash that is of the living fire’s corpse tastes like sulfur on your tongue. You are between the portal and the King, who is between you and your corpse. Your fists, this time, are enough. 

Cutting the pearls from the living void’s skin is tedious, and the round orb resting in your palms feels like the touch of the living acid that lives in swampland. You collect them anyways. There is a meaning to your madness, even if you cannot see it.   
  
The touch of the living fire’s not-ash wakes something in the wet eggs. They escape your grasp and lurch towards the sky, all in the same direction. They shake on the apex of their flight, sliding between a space you cannot comprehend. Some shatter. Some drop. You wonder what they’re traveling towards.

You follow them.

They lead you across the ocean, towards a jungle, through a desert. You follow them.    
  
They fade through the ground. Still, you follow, digging into the earth with your bare hands, straight down. This is a mistake. You are lucky there is water in the ruins, as it catches you on the edge of another death.

There are pots arranged in a circle, colored the same shade as your awakened eggs. Their gazes burn as you slot them into place with a high, ringing noise. The eyes glow as they begin to shake, and a crack splits in the world with a burst of lightning. The portal that opens is the shade of midnight, and filled with stars. It roars. It beckons.

Obsidian Obelisks reaching towards the sky, caged spells leeched from their source of power. Void-beings, tall and cooing as you diligently avoid meeting their eyes with your own. The floating hive, the sandy desert. The flying beast, the False God. Your arrows rarely miss their mark. In the empty fountain the shade of static, the False God reaches through reality and their bruises begin to fade. This is not allowed. 

Your blade, this time, is enough.

They crack, rent through by your blows, and raise up like the eyes that guided you to this land. At the apex they combust, their skin cracked and whatever divinity they might have held expunged with their death. The crystalized ichor tastes like the powder of the tall plants on the water’s edge, and the sound that it makes as it slides beneath your skin is calming, and cute.

The fountain is filled. At the top, where water might fall, there is an egg, instead. The shell cracks against your teeth, and you swallow the yolk in one mighty gulp.

The fountain is full of the blood of the False God, and you Know that sinking beneath it would bring you somewhere Else. Maybe even home. But, not yet. There are contained spells, tesseracts beneath tempered glass, and you follow them. These island-hives are long abandoned, and the people there… are not the same as you, not anymore, but.

They run elongated digits through your hair, and nuzzle their skeletal bodies against you like the least touchy kind of hug. They  _ teach _ you. The strange runic language of the tesseracts is yours now, forbidden as all things, and when you ache with hunger they feed you the strange dry mushroom fruits that explode with spores in your mouth and taste like entropy. Purple bruises bloom on your skin, and the strange creatures hiding in the hollows of the exploded mushrooms don’t target you anymore. You arm falls off, and beneath it bloom the same arm as these forgotten creatures who coo at you in their language of warped sounds, and you can understand them now.

It’s Time, you Know. Weeks among the forests of the forgotten, dancing among the sands with those who love you, and petting the creatures the color that you now associate with hope. With happiness. 

You slide under the blood of the False God, and you sleep. It tastes like mercury. It feels like an End, and a Beginning.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> backstory. also I use a lot of mods in my minecraft world, specifically recurrent complex, which is where some of the structures come from. also I watched so much game theory for this you have no idea

This isn’t the only parts of it, though.

There is waking, mind blank and hesitating, days spent staring up at the unfamiliar constellations and crying, mourning for people and faces you can no longer name, mourning a world you can no longer remember.   
  
There is the first nightfall, and the struggle to survive. You try to find a tree, but all you find is a chest and some wooden tools. Zombies and skeletons, strange creatures you can name but not explain, words you understand but don’t remember learning.   
  
You’ve died more times than you can count. Sometimes you wake somewhere else.

There are villages and towns, but few of them with tools you recognize, Know how to build the same way you Know that the sun sets at 10:30. The villagers, too, are strange and alien in their words, their tone, and cannot use their surroundings the way that you do. They don’t even look like you, in any way that matters.    
  
You dig through the soil and run across the grassland and swim through the oceans and climb the trees and find ruins numbered along the thousands, remains of people who were like you, who spoke the way you do and wrote in scripts you recognize. Their books are scattered across the ruins like stars, and some are incomprehensible, full of the strange script on the power-filled tomes, the runic craft that twists the world around some items so strangely. But this doesn’t matter. These people existed.   
  
You spent lifetimes chasing them, going through ruin after ruin in search of someone  _ else _ , and found nothing but the chambers they used to fill, the armor they could no longer use, the requests they no longer could fulfil.   
  
There are tombs under the ground. Well, at the space closest to the surface, they’re not tombs. The catacombs beneath strange temples are crawling with the dead, and also spiders aplenty, but the main characteristic they all share is that towards the surface they’re covered in  _ living spaces _ . Carpets and plants and forges and bedrooms and beds, chests full of carrots and pumpkins and mushrooms, farms and the remains of altars worshipping some foreign diety.    
  
Farther down are the tombs. Covered in moss and rot, full of the groaning of the raised dead beneath the closed stone caskets. Skulls line the small holes watching over these tombs, because that’s what they are. In the spaces not overtaken by decay and age, there are hundreds of signs of the dead. And more of the same signs of religion; the multitude of deities above this are whittled down here to maybe four or five. The fifth is a maybe, considering the deep marks on the altar.

(the zombies looked so much like  _ you _ do. There are other ruins- of labs full of villagers and those villagers who had recently turned. Your hope, in this case, did not last very long. No, these dead are beyond saving.)

Below the tombs…   
  
By this point, you’ve explored Hell. You’ve walked the fetid, boiling surface and scoured every bit of it for, well. Anything, really. The solid ground is made of corpses that rot inside-out and don’t compose as much as they congeal, into the boiling surface barren of any life that is not a facsimile of it. The damned are compressed into sands built of their suffering, and any risen life only takes form above the baked bricks of fetid blood. The skeletons here are charred, probably by the same entities of living fire that also share this space. Their bodies collapse into coal dust and their wounds burn as they suck the life they no longer have out of you to replenish whatever remains of their own.   
  
Below the tombs is a nightmare, some faded facsimile of hell. There are pits where the molten souls are mixed with molten stone, signs of torture as metal nooses and machines raise and lower into the liquid pits. There’s what remains of a portal here, too, but it’s broken, torn apart by similar claw marks to those that scoured the fifth god. Down here, the only altars are to the fifth deity, and the fifth deity alone. Time has ravaged this too, but hell is resilient in the way few things are, and it takes much more than time to break it down, even outside of where it is found.    
  
Even farther down, below the hell…

You don’t know. There are strange empty combs, and sands that are more the age-worn dust of the hives than anything. Both of them the color of aged bone.

At the time, it confused you. For many reasons. For one thing- burying the dead whole is irresponsible as fuck if they raise the moment you turn your back. The only thing that would make sense is that these tombs are old enough to predate the undead entirely, which, considering, is kind of likely, but still confusing. For one thing- you’ve seen villages. They’re kind of small. And-  _ hundreds _ of dead? Maybe even thousands of dead?

What could have killed that many people?   
  
Beyond that- the only creatures to be found at the bottom of the catacombs are the strange, tall skeletal creatures the color of obsidian. They coo at you and attack if you meet their eyes, which is odd and awkward but not that bad.

The five deities, as you explore the strange world you found yourself in, and more importantly the ruins of who came before, are important. They’re everywhere, which is definitely a sign of a common culture, especially when dying and coming back to a different land still has these strange deities littering the ruins on the landscape.   
  
There are the bearded creation gods, twins, one with white hair and black eyes and one with brown hair and white eyes. They’re both obviously male in every old painting and every carving you can find, identified by the pretty obvious dicks on both of them. They’re also? Very, very old. In ruins rotted halfway through, only holding up through time with luck, there are children's books, carvings, paintings, and altars for these two gods. Notch of the lands in the air, and Herobrine of the lands in the sea. Seaborn ruins made of the compacted stones and moss hold his shape most clearly; despite the square-shaped pufferfish who stare at you and launch their spines through their eyes, it’s not incredibly difficult to explore the underwater spaces and find similar altars.

Usually, for Herobrine, these altars are well stocked with gold. Most of the wooden structures have rotted through, including boats, but the vast majority of them all have some level of gold hidden within them. Another thing is that, well. During some time that is referred to as ‘the drowning’ in the books, the temples and cities dedicated to worshipping Herobrine all.... Well. Disappeared down to the bottom of the ocean. The ruins that  _ do _ refer to the drowning also refer to Herobrine as some kind of demon, and it’s pretty obvious how the main focus switches from worshipping the two of them as a duality to worshipping Notch pretty much  _ only _ . 

These gods are well known. They’re well built. They have history and knowledge and age. The others… don’t.

The three headed god is the next oldest, and you can find the altars in the catacombs you’d previously explored. Specifically, this god is most prominent in the hell-themed rooms. Supposedly, it's the god of the afterlife… and of resurrection.   
  
You sit down for a really, really long time after reading that. It’s not so much a shiver up your spine as it is pure nausea. Something creeps in the corners of your attention, and you think you know where all those people are now. But, well, you’ve gone this far, and you don’t really  _ know, _ so. You keep going.

The three headed god is everywhere, now that you’re looking for it. Most prominently it’s found in places of  _ death.  _ The sand temples of buried corpses protected by explosives have the three headed god carved  _ everywhere _ . Hell, the front of the place is even vaguely  _ shaped _ like the three-headed god!

There’s a female god, too, which might be a relief, but if she has an actual name you can’t find her  _ anywhere. _ She’s a builder god too, you know, but she’s younger than the two greater gods and older than the three headed god… maybe. They're about the same age. You only  _ think _ she’s older because, well, of the evidence.    
  
This goddess is found mainly in villages. In paintings that depict the female god sometimes- in fact, usually- there is some kind of skeleton also there. Which might be the skeletal god, but it might just be a skeleton. She’s also very, very rare. Rarer than any of the other gods to the point it makes you suspect that she might not be a god at all.   
  
But, well. You’ve noticed something that’s incredibly important. In this land, in this world, the only one that seems to be able to affect your surroundings is you. You, and people like you. Villagers can’t build, or craft, like you can. They can  _ use _ chests and open doors like you can, but they can’t make them like you can. The other thing that makes you think that the female god might not be a god at all is that only the villagers seem to worship her. It’s only in their strange, guttural language that she’s barely mentioned at  _ all, _ and to them, she’s their creator goddess.

She made them, somehow. Which. You’ve seen the iron golems come into being. You’ve made them, yourself. Besides aesthetics, the two of them are eerily similar. Villagers farm, and they trade, for that strange magical green stone that’s the same color as their eyes. Iron Golems attack hostile undead. That’s it. There’s no growth, no anything, just ‘hhrr’ and ‘hmm’.   
  


Something built the village, and it certainly wasn’t the villagers. They can’t use furnaces; you can. 

… on the inside of the mansions where illagers roam and those hex creatures float through walls, there’s a room that has an illager head with green eyes. On the inside of the head is a block that’s made of lapis, where the brain should be.   
  
The shape of the people- the  _ builders- _ that used to exist here, takes form. A Main pantheon with gods focused on creation with your own two hands, and the increasing religious fanaticism as people try to live up to that, add their own depictions to that, and try to expand outward and create something almost impossible. Life.   
  
They succeeded, you know. Villagers, Guardians, Iron Golems, are the proof of that. But there’s always a cost for that sort of thing.

Hubris and pride are the unmakers of two kinds of beings. Heroes, and gods. You Know this.   
  
But that doesn’t answer your real questions- where are they  _ now _ ? What killed so many of them? And what were they running from? What were they trying to do so very hard? Sane people don’t make torture chambers out of hellish bricks and decorate it with the screams of the damned. And why are the dead rising?    
  
You have parts of it already. The seaside ruins depict the traditional worship of their sea god as they reap his bounty on the beach. The similar structures on land worship Notch, and speak of the ‘drowning’. There are the rotted remains of boats in every bit of ocean you manage to find, all of them with this strange magical map that leads to annoying buried treasures. The Drowned  _ beings _ all carry the shells of Nautilisks. The only place you can find the Heart of the Sea is by following these maps. The heart of the sea, a religious altar made of  _ prismarine _ that allows you to see through the water, breathe in it, and build within it.   
  
Herobrine starts as a twin god to Notch. The ocean to his land. The latest mentions of him attribute to him two new titles. Those of the damned, and those of the dead.   
  
A priest’s last hope as the waters rise in the temple you find sticking out of the sands. There’s a Drowned holding the book. Desperate prayers turned angry curses, unleashed back on those who doubted him. The both of them, resigned to the sea. Except not. A sickness unleashed on those who doubted him, killing… so many.   
  
You know why so many are dead, now. How many children were in that count? How many siblings? Mothers? Fathers? Family? What would the survivors do to get them back?   
  
They travel to hell next, attempting to follow their loved ones to the next stage of the afterlife, or maybe rescue them from it. Except the living’s very existence in this place is not kind in any way, when the very land itself begs you to join it in its misery. The three headed skeletal god, of afterlives and resurrection.    
  
Four square metres of sanded souls. Three withered skeleton skulls. An attempt to change everything, that doomed every _ one. _

  
The King of Hell does not like to be awakened. You know that from personal experience.   
  
Then… the void beings. The strange eggs under their skin. Mixing the egg with the ash of the living fire creatures awakens them. They fight to return. Return… where?   
  
You follow those before you’s desperate race to outrun the king of hell. You follow it down to a stronghold, a prison turned bunker. The decorative pots. The only intact altar of the fifth god. The dragon god of protection, and heaven. You place the eye looking eggs in their pots. Reality cracks.   
  
The strange twisting spires of bone and fungus. The buildings that mimic their shape, full of books in a language you cannot read. At first.    
  
In the construct that was supposed to be a god, there was a sickness that tastes like those mentioned when Herobrine was around. A curse of endless hunger that no food could quench, that water could not help. Except, for the construct with three heads that was meant to be a god, this sickness was that of the heart. Muscles sink into atrophy, organs decay, and lungs collapse under the force of the third king’s hatred of the living. Under Herobrine’s curse, people would change into beasts of rotted, sallow flesh that braved the oceans and hungered for the taste of human flesh. Under the King of Hell’s curse, humans grow skeletal and tainted black under the force of the flames and their own sins.    
  
The fifth god had his own curse to give. The False God, Avatar of Human destruction, who was also built to  _ protect _ them. In a world with no water, and only one kind of food, being the strange teleporting fungus plants. He changed them, like his death changed you.   
  
You know where your people are, now. And you are achingly, emptyingly, alone.   
  
The fountain would take you on, you Know. Maybe, it would even take you Home. But you don’t know where home is, anymore.   
  
_ I just don’t want to be alone anymore. _ _   
_ _   
_ __ “I ↸𝙹リ'ℸ ̣ ∴ᔑリℸ ̣ ℸ ̣ 𝙹 ʖᒷ ᔑꖎ𝙹リᒷ ᔑリ||ᒲ𝙹∷ᒷ”.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thats enchantment table, also known as 'endeman speech'. if you want to know what this character looks like here u go. https://negentropic.tumblr.com/post/645749532048654336/the-void-as-a-sickness-contained-third-stage-in

**Author's Note:**

> Aspect of Bones was named that day because it was a shitpost about how the longest thing i'd ever read before embers is a bleach fanfiction called Aspect of Blades and I was feeling sleep deprived and salty. this is called aspect of entropy because the most popular fanfiction ive ever written is a shitpost about canibalism. you think you suckers know cannibalism? haha eat bath salts nerds.


End file.
